This man is too sensitive. He lingers on memories of his long lost son. He gets irate with his beautiful wife when she wants to start their lives over. He’s quick to fire employees. Most of all, his hearing is too strong. It’s so acute that a fly on glass ten feet away sounds like hammers on a forge.
The concept of sensation as a personal threat has a solid history in horror, but it’s mostly of the ocular variety. The Eyes of Laura Mars. X – The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Even Mick Garris got into the mix with last year’s Chocolate (which is still good, damn it). While some gripe about this sub-sub-genre’s status as horror, I don’t really care. It’s a change of pace, and as long as it’s done well, why complain?
Brad Anderson is more than up to the challenge. His previous two films were the stylistic thrillers session 9 and The Machinist. With Sounds Like, he continues his trend of stories that support a spectacular command of craft. Garris was wise to choose him for this series. While Anderson’s films aren’t terrifying, they’re classy and eerie, a nice complement to the manic dementia of Rob Zombie and dark action of Neil Marshall.
Brad Anderson films the story as bright and cheerful as possible. The main character resides in a floodlit house and goes to work at a cube farm bathed in flourescent light. Any scenes in darkness are brief. It’s an odd choice, but it fits. In this tale, the horror isn’t lying in the shadows. It’s in every mundane sound that threatens to puncture the hero’s ears.
The idea sounds like a gimmick, and, to an extent, that’s exactly what Sounds Like is. A glorious, wonderful gimmick full of epic sound work. The attention to detail is shocking, given this series’ tendency to move at a lightning pace. Chris Bauer gives an appropriately twitchy main performance. Although he busies himself with headphones, loud hobbies, and his own spots of seclusion, his hearing slowly drives him insane.
Too slowly. Sounds Like barely fills its fifty minutes, but, even then, the episode drags toward the end. The sound is beautiful, but it’s too consistent. We get the feeling that this man has lived with this problem for some time. He could easily be driven insane by the wealth of noise, but it’s only toward the very end that the sound becomes unbearable. But that complaint pales against everything that works.
Sounds Like is, for much of its runtime, some weird type of masterpiece. The story allows the sound designers to run wild and enunciate, increase, hide, mute, muffle, and otherwise play with the rules of what we can hear. Movies like this can be invigorating, where we watch craftsmen work at their jobs with joy and energy. As a bonus, the ending closes with a lovely image that completes the story on the perfect note. This is one of the best episodes yet.
